In May, Woo Suk Hwang, South Korea’s “king of cloning”, announced that his team had made embryonic stem cells (ESCs) that were genetically tailored to individual patients and had the potential to develop into any tissue or organ in the body. The world bowed.
Hwang was no stranger to stem cell glory, as he had already shown he could create cloned embryonic stem cells. However, many had doubted the efficiency of his technique, which requires an adult cell and an egg, and it had taken 242 eggs to create just one ESC line. But Hwang answered the doubters by repeating…
